French députés' offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open source productivity software. There will be 1154 French parliamentary workstations running on an open source OS, with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and an open source email client.

Linux applications tend to take more RAM than windows counterpart, even for the same application written by the same software developers.

This is an outright lie. Most actually take much less RAM because in linux 90% of the code is shared with PIC-ed .so files, while in windows, most app take all their libraries with them. What you measure is probably all the memory each app takes + shared memory, which usually is actually taking most of it, and should be only counted once as one block for all.

Besides, linux loves Caching, thus your memory will be consumed with cache then when more applications start they will start using swap space...

Yes and no. Linux caches because it's much more effective than what windows does. And no it won't affect swapping because if linux needs more memory it takes it from the cached part which are oldest (afaik, I don't know the choice algorithm).

Actually this is what makes linux SO much more effective than windows. Running even big stuff 2x is what I call "silent" (no disk activity), unlike in windows.

All in all you said all lies.

BTW. I'm running about 5 big apps right now, my usage is 26% of 1GB, and I never saw swap being used. Perhaps CentOS is kind of broken? Even with big stuff like compilation/linking and image processing I never got swap active. Even with big late games like doom or nwn. Can't say so for windows tho. It's swapping like hell all the time.